Vastly superior as regards pictorial quality and the whole conception, is the _Abduction of Psyche by Zephyrus_ (No. 756). In the _Crucifixion_ (No. 744), his last picture, Prud’hon rises to telling dramatic effectiveness of colour, and heralds the advent of Delacroix. But the most masterly of his seventeen paintings at the Louvre is the magnificent _Portrait of a Young Man_ (No. 753), which the Louvre was fortunate enough to secure for £35 in 1895. It is a strangely living evocation of a personality, searching, intimate, and mysterious—a portrait not so much of the superficial features, but of the inner life of the sitter. The large _Portrait of the Empress Joséphine_ (No. 751) suffers from comparison with this masterpiece. The pose is affected, the background dingy, and the red of the shawl introduces a harsh and disconnected note of colour. THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH SCHOOL GÉRICAULT The revolutionary movement of the Romanticists, which was to find a strong leader in Eugène Delacroix, may be said to have been initiated by Géricault’s epoch-making picture _The Raft of the Medusa_ (No. 338, Plate XLVI.). Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), a pupil of Carle Vernet and Guérin, was an unusually gifted draughtsman, who from the outset strove to go beyond the dead perfection of the David school, and to infuse into his work the spark of life. The _Raft of the Medusa_, which caused an enormous stir at the Salon of 1819, was inspired by a tragic incident from actual life; and Géricault was the first who dared to represent in all its horrible reality this scene of human suffering—the survivors of a shipwreck driven by hunger to madness and mutual destruction. He set aside all arbitrarily ignored canons of formal beauty and the “grand style,” and applied himself to depicting fierce passions and emotions. Géricault was a passionate lover of horses; but his knowledge of equine anatomy did not prevent him, in his portrait of an _Officer of the Guard_ (No. 339), from exaggerating the action of the charging horse to a point dangerously near the border-line between the sublime and the ridiculous. Most of his other pictures at the Louvre are studies of soldiers, and horses on the race-course or in the stable. He died in 1824 from the effects of a fall from a horse. DELACROIX